Scott Yenor provides a framework to understand the present and real battle for the soul of America, not to mention other western democracies.  His American Greatness article is Conservatives and Our Queer Constitution, an excerpt from his book on the subject. Article excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Queer Constitution

Every country has a sexual constitution: a set of laws and opinions, which use shame and honor to shape and guide sexuality. The old marital constitution was, shall we say, the Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives. This Straight Constitution upheld a vision of marriage that, among other things, limited divorce and proscribed fornication, contraception, sodomy, and adultery, promoted a family wage (under some circumstances), and imagined marriage for the purposes of procreation and educating offspring. We lived under the Straight Constitution until roughly the 1970s.

That constitution no longer exists, or perhaps just barely.
We currently live under the Queer Constitution, which claims
to—and in fact does—reject the Straight Constitution.

The Queer Constitution was developed by winning legal battles in the service of broader cultural recognition of what once were called alternative lifestyles. It moved from gay rights in the 1970s, to proclaiming “Gay Pride” a virtue in the 1990s, to a legal recognition of the constitutional right to sodomy in the early 2000s, to making the Boy Scouts and the U.S. military accept homosexuals, to constitutionalizing same-sex marriage in the 2010s, to protecting gender identity under the civil rights laws in the 2020s, to practically banning intellectual and legal opposition to the Queer Constitution on speech platforms.

Some conservatives fought these changes. Nonetheless, nearly all acquiesced to them serially—fighting against new extensions while accepting their previous defeats. Rarely have conservatives acted as if the future of practices encouraged under the Straight Constitution—with its manner of directing passions and ordering loves—depended on reversing efforts to queer our sexual constitution.

At the Queer Constitution’s core are two ideas:

First, that all sexual behaviors, if consensual, are equal and dignified.
Second, that society’s binary, heteronormative gender identity is an iron cage, hampering individual expression and happiness.

The Queer Constitution honors all manner of sex. Laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional. These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.

The live-and-let-live attitude, hoped for by conservatives and
promised by revolutionaries, cannot in principle hold.

Indeed, the move from legal tolerance to public celebration is perfectly logical. Human beings are social and political animals. Many parts of their lives take place in private, but society nevertheless recognizes and applauds public manifestations of private acts. Under the Straight Constitution, no one watches a husband and wife having sex, but the public celebrates their weddings and their births, and the public recognizes their common property. Weddings themselves are a recognition of the importance of the marriage for the couple and for society as such.

Advocates of the Queer Constitution wanted and needed
such public affirmation for their private acts.

From the private protection or tolerance of “gay rights,” advocates moved on to taking pride in “coming out of the closet.” Failure to show a similar pride is a public insult, punishable through social opprobrium, as violations of hate speech codes, or worse. Advocates sought and won legal recognition for same-sex marriage, visitation rights for same-sex partners, and the right to adopt children, but they did not stop at such a legal infrastructure. That is because the Queer Constitution demands public celebration of queerness. School curricula must be queered, the better to educate children before“homophobia” sets in. Men dressed as sexualized women must read children’s books to children in public libraries, lest they grow up to think transgenderism is abnormal. “Love makes the family”—rather than a mother and a father—must become the morality of every generation. Christian bakers must be made to bake the wedding cake for gay couples, lest failure to bake the cake insult the gay couple.

As to the next frontiers: strictures against adult sex with children are being “problematized” and are now eroding. Calls to lower the age of consent and to embrace pedophilia chic are beginning, including among politicians. Incest taboos are already being subjected to critical questions. “Live and let live” turns into “comply or else.”

Many pro-family activists pretend dishes of the Queer Constitution
can be accepted à la carte without ordering the whole Queer menu.

Beyond the law and public morality, the Queer Constitution rules in the scientific professions, our major corporations, our education system, the Boy Scouts, the American military, and countless other commanding heights in our culture and within our families. Even churches openly support it. What had been considered bad under the Straight Constitution must now be considered good under the Queer Constitution, and vice versa. Many conservatives refused to see the Queer Constitution as the Left’s imperial project, one aimed at subverting and dishonoring the Straight Constitution. Now this imperial project has gone international.

Conservatives can no longer indulge in libertarian fantasies.
Peaceful coexistence between a queer and a straight constitution is not sustainable.

At its deepest level, the Queer Constitution elevates sexual pleasure and sexual self-expression as the goods of adults that have a dominant hold on the human heart, instead of procreation, familial duties, and parental responsibility. One’s sexual identity becomes who one is. Expressing sex in whatever way becomes a crucial right. All eros becomes sexual eros. Dealing with the consequences of sex—including, most crucially, children—becomes someone else’s problem or not a problem at all, since there are fewer kids.

In contrast, under the Straight Constitution, sex is something one does, not who one is. Life under this constitution encourages individuals to make sex serve something higher, like the duties of parenthood or finding its place within a marital regime. When people are taught that sex is who they are, they are less likely to see beyond sex to higher duties.

The duties associated with marriage and parenthood necessarily
wither as the Straight Constitution shapes fewer and fewer lives.

This social contagion has profound effects on individual happiness and social health. Indeed, sexual constitutions do not create human desires, but they play a large part in shaping them. Like a command-and-control economy, our reengineered ways work poorly, damaging men and women. Suicide rates and rates of drug abuse have spiked. People are more and more medicated. Health crises proliferate, depending on the lifestyle. Life expectancy sinks. A sense of personal mission, centered on family life, fades, and with it fades human ambition and purpose. Children mutilate themselves, at parental, medical, or teacher suggestion. Damage to transgender children is irreversible. Society as a whole is less happy, less trusting, less confident.

A rejuvenated conservatism would recognize, as did leftist activists a generation ago, that easygoing coexistence between a decent Straight Constitution and the Queer Constitution is not possible. As a result, the family must be self-consciously repoliticized. Given the centrality of politics, as the New Right appreciates, the Queer Constitution must be rejected root and branch and replaced with a new Straight Constitution, duly changed for our circumstances, supporting man-woman marriage, enduring marriage, procreative sex, and parental responsibility. From the perspective of the New Right, the Old Right may have hoped to achieve the goal of a decent family life, but the Old Right did not will the means to achieve it.

The Old Right is correct in seeing that nature provides materials from which decent family life might arise, but the manner of guiding nature is crucial. The queer revolutionaries long ago recognized that sexual passions and priorities could be bent away from enduring marriage—and they built a queering ethic to accomplish it. The New Right must work with the building blocks of nature, but it must also show that our Queer Constitution is a source of misery and social decline, and that a new Straight Constitution is more humane, fosters happiness, and creates an enduring social fabric with lasting man-woman marriage at its heart.

What are these natural building blocks? Differences between men and women are natural. It is a natural fact that only man-woman sex can produce children. Sexual impulses are natural in the sense that they are spontaneous; and they are mostly, absent a countervailing cultural tendency, toward man-woman relations. Men and women in the main have crucially different psychologies, fitting them for life together and raising kids and reflecting something like checks and balances. Childhood is naturally a state of helplessness for human beings. The family, like the sex integrated into it, is based in nature but it is always mediated by laws. A decent sexual constitution would take all these facts into account, while pointing to better, sturdier relations to make them serve human happiness, personal excellence, and the social good.

The Old Right could not conserve a decent society, though many knew the stakes. Eventually conservatives compromised, hoping for the best, which resulted in the step-by-step adoption of the Queer Constitution. Perhaps they could do no different, given the class arrangements of our new managerial elite. Becoming elite meant acquiescing in the Sexual Revolution. Resisting that revolution meant irrelevance. But this bargain is up: conservatives are now outside the ruling classes and inconsequential. For society, embracing the Queer Constitution combines the costs of having weak, adult-focused marriage customs with all the costs associated directly with this constitution. The result has been individual misery, social decline, and a barren future. The perversities will keep mounting, as advocates for the Queer Constitution are clearly coming for the children, a fact they themselves now openly admit.

All civilizational founders recognized the importance of promoting a straight constitution and stigmatizing its alternatives. The New Right must follow the deep wisdom of such founders where it leads. Only a return to an uncompromising Straight Constitution can reverse our decline.